Aditi Gupta

10:30am, Monday 30 November 2015, ITE 346

Online social media is a powerful platform for dissemination of information during real world events. Beyond the challenges of volume, variety and velocity of content generated on online social media, veracity poses a much greater challenge for effective utilization of this content by citizens, organizations, and authorities. Veracity of information refers to the trustworthiness /credibility / accuracy / completeness of the content. This work addressed the challenge of veracity or trustworthiness of content posted on social media. We focus our work on Twitter, which is one of the most popular microblogging web service today. We provided an in-depth analysis of misinformation spread on Twitter during real world events. We showed effectiveness of automated techniques to detect misinformation on Twitter using a combination of content, meta-data, network, user profile and temporal features. We developed and deployed a novel framework, TweetCred for providing indication of trustworthiness / credibility of tweets posted during events. TweetCred, which was available as a browser plug-in, was installed and used by real Twitter users.

Dr. Aditi Gupta is a research associate in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at UMBC. She received her Ph.D. from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) in 2105 for her dissertation on designing and evaluating techniques to mitigate misinformation spread on microblogging web services.